The Single Cell Analysis Congress took place last week in London, UK. Paul Oakley, our Regional Manager for Europe, Muriel Breteau, Nadia Shakir and Juliane Fischer, three of our Application Specialists and two of our Research Biologists, were lucky enough to join this meeting. The conference had an excellent array of speakers, with talks from some of the best-known names in the single cell community, including: Roman Zubarev, Akos Vertes and Klaas Mulder to name a few. Some of the hot topics during this meeting were centered around multi-omics and multi-prolonged approaches as well as spacial transcriptomics.
This first day began with an array of talks, including presentations from Florian Rambow, Stephen Clark and Bart Westendorp. One fascinating talk was on High Through-Put Single Cell Metabolomics from Akos Vertes, who demonstrated a robust method for single cell metabolomics using Laser Ablation Electro Spray Ionization.
Following on from Thursday, the second day showcased similar themes, but this time focusing more on antibody discovery and single cell data analysis, with talks from Caroline Gubser Kelleron Data Powered Drug Discovery, and Klaas Mulder on RAID-seq – a method for intracellular (phospho-)protein quantification combined with RNA-seq from single cells.
The conference ended on Friday, but not before more great sessions covering the hot topic of single cell applications in therapeutic discovery and development, with talks on deep mining of the antibody repertoire and T-cell heterogeneity. This was rounded up by parallel stream on single cell data analysis, detailing some of the analysis challenges that the field faces, as well as the newest developments, such as the introduction of the new single cell data analysis tool, SCHNAPPs.
During the event, Dolomite Bio, also launched their newest application note “Encapsulating single cells in agarose”. Using the Nadia Innovate, single cells can now be encapsulated in agarose and grown for long periods of time within these individual microenvironments. This approach permits a range of research into various scientific fields, including single cell research. Encapsulating single cells in agarose is particularly beneficial when undertaking cancer research to study tumor development, drug screening once colonies of cancer cells are established and growing single cells in gel spheres (which can also facilitate cell seeding onto 3D scaffolds to form hydrogel matrices for in vitro tissue synthesis).
To find out more, or to download our newest application note, please visit our application page.